Taryn Nicole, Author at Retro Food For Modern Times

Author: Taryn Nicole

12
Jul
2020

The Case of the Exploding Egg – Vegetarian Scotch Eggs

No, this is not one of Agatha Christie’s little known cases but true-life kitchen drama. Do you think there is such a thing as Covid brain? Because I feel I have become increasingly scatty over the last few…how long have we been in lockdown now? Oh, that’s right, it doesn’t matter how long because we have just gone back into it for another SIX weeks. 😕 For the love of God, people of Melbourne stay TF away from each other. Most of you aren’t even that attractive, why anyone in their right mind would want to get in your personal space is beyond me!

Ok. Rant over. Deep breaths and let’s talk about Vegetarian Scotch Eggs. And explosions.

Oh, these were so good!! The idea from them came from me making Diana Henry’s Baby Pumpkins with mixed mushrooms, leeks, grains. This was also totally delicious and I can heartily recommend making it!

But, after making this, I had a lot of the stuffing mix left. This is no disrespect to Diana. I’m sure had I wanted to stuff 8 eight baby pumpkins her quantities would have been just fine. I was cooking for one. There are usually only a certain amount of times you can divide a recipe before becoming nonsensical. You can generally halve quantities. Sometimes quarter them to no ill effect. Trying to cook to an eighth of a recipe makes no sense. So I guesstimated what I would need for one pumpkin which left me with a lot of leftover filling. The filling was delicious so there was no way I was going to waste it but what to do with it?

My first thought was arancini. But why stop at arancini when you can also put an egg in it? And thus the ideal of my vegetarian scotch egg was born. I popped an egg onto boil, intending to have the perfect four minute boiled egg in the centre of my scotchie. Then went back to work. So, about half an hour later I was drawn out of some intense concentration on a particularly fascinating spreadsheet by what sounded like a bomb going off in my kitchen. First, there was a massive bang, very closely followed by something hitting the window so hard I’m surprised the glass didn’t shatter. The water had dried out in the pan so much that the egg had actually exploded!!!! There was egg shrapnel all over my kitchen. It was like eggmageddon in there!

Like this but on the stove:

Vegetarian Scotch Eggs Take Two

You know how when people who can’t cook say I can’t even boil an egg? So, after the first egg EXPLODED, and I’d cleaned the kitchen and taken a few sedatives because the goddamn thing sounded like a bomb and my heart was pounding like a jackhammer it was time for egg number 2.

On the positive side…this one didn’t explode.

But I did kind of wander off mid-cook to take a call and lost track of egg time. I could tell while peeling it that it was hard-boiled and not the beautiful runny yolk I wanted. But I wrapped it in the mushroom, leek and barley filling regardless. This is the year of not wasting anything remember.

Sure we lost an egg in some explosive collateral damage but you know …I blame Covid for that. I have no rationale for that blame. It’s fucking everything else up so it can also take the blame for my exploding egg. And you know if I hadn’t been working from home and been distracted from cooking it by…errmmmm…work…

Let’s swiftly move away from that one.

Egg 2 turned out pretty delish even though hard-boiled.

Vegetarian Scotch Eggs Take Three

I had a little of the mushroom filling leftover after wapping egg 2. Third-time lucky right? Right! This time I did not take my eyes off that pan for the entire four minutes. I barely blinked. And voila the perfect 4-minute egg as per the pictures above and below

Because it was still so soft it was a little harder to wrap in the filling than the hard-boiled egg. I was terrified I would press too hard and cause the yolk to ooze out before I could get it crumbed and fried.

It’s a bit hard to give you a recipe for this because it was based on the leftovers from the Diana Henry recipe which is here:

You need to judge how many eggs your leftover filling wil cover. To crumb and cook the Scotch Eggs, see my recipe for Pakistani Scotch Eggs. To get your eggs the way you want them, see below:

In lieu of a proper recipe this week, here is a little list of what is currently floating my boat.

Watching

Crazy Delicious – an amazing cooking show on Netflix. Think Heston done by home cooks, a magical ingredient garden, a delightful host in Jayde Adams, oh and Heston is one of the judges!

Dead Pixels – another British show, this time a comedy about the lives of three people obsessed with a video game.

Searching For Sugarman – this was our most recent film club choice. It’s so touching and warm-hearted and as an added bonus, the sounds track is awesome! There has not been a DAY since I watched it when I have not listened to Rodriguez’s Cold Fact at least once!

Reading

I just finished reading “One of Us is Next” which is Karen McManus’ follow up to “One of Us is Lying”. I didn’t love it as much as the first book but it was still a good fun read.

Podding

My current fave is Season 4 of Slow Burn by Slate. I loved Season 1 & 2 of this which covered Watergate and The Clintons respectively. I have not listened to S3 which is about Biggie and Tupac yet but I am going to start it in the next few days. Season 4 is about David Duke who is ~~a total dick~~ a white supremacist politician from Louisiana, and formerly a grand wizard poobah double dragon something from the KuKluxKlan. ~~AKA~~ ~~a total f**king dick..~~

Here’s Topher Grace brilliantly playing him in Black Klansman.

Please send me your recommendations for books, tv, pods, films, music something, anything to keep me entertained over the next few weeks!

Life Update

Just to make us all feel a little bit better about the state of the world, here is a picture of Holly being adorable. This little dog has absolutely captured our hearts in the last 6 months. She has gone from a timid little thing who was scared of everything to a cheeky little girl who is confident and happy in her life. Being able to give such a lovely girl, who has had such a terrible life, a loving home for the last chapters of her life is the best thing we have done for a long time!

If anyone is thinking about adopting an older dog or a dog rescued from medical research please reach out. I am happy to share our experiences.

Have a great week everyone! Have fun, stay safe, and please, send me your recommendations for books, films, podcasts, tv, etc!

03
Jul
2020

John Hillerman’s Paella

categories: Celebrity Recipes, Rice, Spain

Does anyone know / remember The Libertines song “Music When The Lights Go Out”? The hook line in this piece of indie-pop boy love runs “All the highs and the lows and the to’s and fro’s, they left me dizzy”. That is exactly how I felt when making John Hillerman’s Paella. No doubt about it, this was a tough cook. But oh boy did it pay off!

The Lows

Converted rice? Not available for love or money.
Clams in clam juice ? Nada.
Bottled clam juice? No, nay, never.
Polish Sausage…probably could have bought some but I had chorizo in the freezer which seemed more paella-ish anyway

I made this during the height of the ‘rona lockdown. But I honestly feel that my inability to get hold of these ingredients were not limited to that insane time of food shortages.

So, had this been one of my recipes? I would have ripped it up and we would have never more heard of it. But this was was not my recipe, this was John Hillerman’s Paella recipe that I was testing for Jenny for her Murder She Wrote Cookbook so onward and upward it was.

The To’s and And The Fro’s

I didn’t have converted rice. I didn’t have clam juice. Which meant I could not follow the first step of the recipe.

I had:

Bomba paella rice.
Fresh clams.
Frozen fish stock.

This meant that if I found another recipe that got me through that first step of cooking the rice, then the rest should fall into place like one of those Rube Goldberg machines I have become obsessed with during lockdown.

The recipe I used was this one. I followed all the directions for cooking the rice per that recipe. But then switched back to John Hillerman’s Paella recipe from the step where he says to “saute the chicken in olive oil”.

Here is John’s recipe:

I was literally toing and froing between the two recipes and the pan and the ingredients, making sure everything cooked properly!

The Highs

Have you seen the photos? This dish was lush!!! It was so pretty, so colourful, so full of joy!

It looked gorgeous, smelled like heaven and tasted even better.

John Hillerman’s Paella brought the smell and taste of Spain into a very grey wintery Melbourne day. It was seriously like a ray of sunshine!

I LOVED this!!!! So, so, so good!!!!! The end result made it all worthwhile!!!

Thank you Jenny for the recipe! This is the best paella I have ever made and I will be sure to make it again! When travel opens up and we can spend time together again, this definitely needs to be on our menu! In my imagination, we are sitting in your garden with Mr R and Battenberg Belle and having a lovely long lunch of paella, great conversation, lots of vino, and some great tunes courtesy of Mr Rathbone. Some ’60’s bossa nova maybe?

Oh, also for those of you like me who do not know who John Hillerman was? His best-known role was as the incredibly suave Higgins In Magnum PI but he also appeared in Blazing Saddles, Chinatown (high on my must-see list), Murder She Wrote (obvs), and A Very Brady Sequal among many, many other films and tv shows!

Have a fabulous week friends!

Stay safe, eat paella, watch John Hillerman on the tv and listen to The Libertines!

Sounds like a pretty good way to spend the weekend to me!

28
Jun
2020

Cheese-Stuffed Chillies

categories: 1970's recipes, Cheese, Chilli, Good Housekeeping World Cookery

These cheese-stuffed chillies are based on a recipe from the Ceylon section of Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery Book. So…I know a little bit about Sri Lankan cooking and never have I ever heard of a cheese-stuffed chilli. Never. Not once. Just in case I am not being entirely clear – no one in my family, not my grandmothers, not my mother, not my aunts, cousins, no other writers of Sri Lankan cookbooks have ever made or even mentioned cheese stuffed chillies in the context of Sri Lankan cooking.

Until now.

I became a little obsessed with this recipe because I started wondering if this was the original Jalapeno popper. Turns out the term jalapeno popper came to prominence in Texas in around 1972 so the recipes are definitely contemporaneous in time if a continent or two apart in space.

The recipe was vague about the type of cheese to use. Mum said that in Sri Lanka when she was growing up the only types of cheese available were Kraft cheese in a tin and Edam. Neither of which I happened to have on hand.

I did have some goat’s cheese and I remembered that my friend Leesa once brought an amazing dish to cookbook club that was feta baked with thyme, honey and walnut. Which also accounted for the other thing that was bothering me which was the inclusion of sugar in the recipe.

Hmm…so goat’s cheese to sub for the cheese in a tin, honey to sub in for the sugar. Looks like a recipe is coming together!

These cheese-stuffed chillies were delicious!!!!

There was some heat from the chillis, creaminess and a little bit of salty tanginess from the cheeseand the mustard, sweetness from the honey, crunchy toastiness from the nuts and a hit of herbiness from the thyme.

Perfect drinking snack!!!

I could have eaten a dozen of these with an ice-cold beer on a sunny afternoon. And I would have been in total bliss! They were also nice with a glass of red wine on a cold winter’s night too!

A Digression in the World of Major League Eating

Which reminds me. I found this amazing factoid on Wikipedia when doing some research on the origin of the jalapeno popper.

“Joey “Jaws” Chestnut holds the Major League Eating record for jalapeño poppers, eating 118 in 10 minutes at the University of Arizona on 8 April 2006.”

This of course took me down a path of Major League Eating. Turns out our boy Jaws (known on the MLE site as “the greatest eater in history” and “the apex predator” does not restrict himself to the jalapeno. He also holds records for downing Chicken Wings (both long form and 12 minute), pulled pork sandwiches, hot dogs, meat pies, donuts, eggs, asparagus, corned beef sandwiches, pork ribs, Philly Cheesesteaks, funnel cakes, fish tacos, mutton sandwichs, traditional tacos, shrimp wontons, pulled pork, horseshoe sandwiches (???), pulled pork sliders, long form burritos, short form ramen, gyros, Twinkies, boysenberry pie, tamales, gyoza, gumbo, ice cream sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, poutine, shrimp cocktail..there are more but I lost the will to live whilst typing that lot out.

Sadly, the prize for French cut green beans (2.71 pounds in six minutes) went to Joey Jaws arch-rival Crazy Legs Conti. Shine on you Crazy Legged Diamond!

Cheese Stuffed Chillies – The Recipe

I also put my stuffed chillies under the grill to melt the cheese, toast the nuts and get some nice roastiness on the chillies. But you could serve them as is per the recipe if you wanted.

The ultimate verdict on these cheese-stuffed chillies is that they are not at all Sri Lankan but are totally delish! Just don’t invite Joey Jaws Chestnut over if you plan on making them. Or make a LOT!

Next stop on the good Housekeeping World Cookery Tour is China! Let’s see what inauthentic food we can find from the land of dragons and emperors! I’m hoping for some dumplings!

Have a great week!

16
Jun
2020

Coffee Ice Cream Sodas – The ManBrown Suit

categories: Coffee, Dining With The Dame, Drinks

Hello crime readers and food lovers! Today on Dining with the Dame I am looking at the food found in the fourth novel by Dame Agatha Christie, The Man in The Brown Suit, published in 1924. Like The Murder on the Links there was not much mention of food – at one point I seriously thought that this post might have to be on “dry toast and ginger-ale” which is mentioned as a meal taken by the very seasick heroine. Happily for me, later in the book she buys not one, but two, coffee ice cream sodas to soothe her jagged nerves following one of her adventures.

The Man in the Brown Suit – The Plot

Our heroine, Anne Beddingfield leads a quiet life but is ever so ready for adventures. After the death of her father she decides she wants to live in London and heads there for a job interview. On the way home, Anne sees a man fall onto the live rail at the station and die. Anne picks up a note dropped by the doctor who pronounced the man dead which reads “17.1 22 Kilmorden Castle”.

The man is identified as LB Carton and in his pocket was a viewing document for The Mill House, owned by Sir Eustace Peddler MD. The very next day a strangled woman is found dead in the same house. The eponymous “man in the brown suit” who was seen entering the property shortly after the dead woman is named a suspect.

Anne realises that Killmorden Castle is the name of a ship, sailing to South Africa. She uses the last of her money to buy a ticket.

Hijinks ensue!

The Man in The Brown Suit contains:

Travel to South Africa
Shifty secretaries
Suspicious clergymen
Stolen diamonds
Romance
Kidnapping
Murder attempts
And of course, the mysterious man in the brown suit

The Man in the Brown Suit is also funnier than any of the previous novels. There are quite a few witty lines, mostly to do with Guy Pagett, the shifty secretary mentioned above.

“Guy Pagett is my secretary, a zealous, painstaking, hardworking fellow, admirable in every respect. I know no one who annoys me more” says Sir Eustace. He also describes Pagett as having “the face of a fourteenth-century poisoner”.

The Covers

A lot of the covers for The Man in The Brown Suit either depict the scene on the train platform or else the ship, The Killmorden Castle.

I have chosen my two favourites here.

The one on the left has a Frank Abignale, Catch Me if You Can vibe which very much enjoyed. The one on the right takes the prize for bonkers with a depiction of a long blonde wig and a bloodied razor.

The Recipe – Coffee Ice Cream Sodas

“I walked into Cartwright’s and ordered two coffee ice-cream sodas – to steady my nerves. A man, I suppose would have had a stiff peg but girls derive a lot of comfort from ice cream sodas”

The Man in the Brown Suit, Agatha Christie

Coffee Ice Cream Soda – Dining with The Dame 4

Print Recipe

So good you might want two! And for the daring, it also has a “stiff peg” in it’

Author: Taryn Nicole
Yield: 1 1x

Ingredients

Scale

¼ cup hot coffee
1 tbsp sugar
1–2 tablespoons coffee liqueur or rum (optional)
Club Soda to fill your glass
2–3 scoops coffee ice cream
Finely grated chocolate (optional)
Maraschino cherry (optional)

Cook Mode Prevent your screen from going dark

Instructions

Stir the sugar into the hot coffee.
Chill until ready to serve.
When ready to serve, add the coffee liqueur / rum.
Pour into your serving glass.
Add the ice cream.
Top with club soda.
Garnish with grated chocolate and a maraschino cherry.

Notes

Alternate or additional garnishes might include chocolate sauce or whipped cream.

Other Food Mentioned in The Man in The Brown Suit

Dry toast and Ginger ale
Chicken Broth
Curry

A Personal Note

I identified with Anne Beddingfield quite a bit, particularly at the start of the book where she is girl from the ‘burbs, longing for both adventure and romance. Cue me at 14…15…16…17….

The plot about the stolen diamonds also made me remember a story I wrote when I was…maybe 10? I had just learned that the nickname for diamonds is “ice” and immediately wrote a story about a band of diamond thieves who hid their stolen wares in a large pitcher when the police came calling.

They would have got away with their nefarious ways except for an eagle-eyed girl detective (Trixie Belden? Nancy Drew? No, ME!) who noticed that on this very hot day, the “ice” in the pitcher was not melting as it should be.

Thieves caught, diamonds restored to their rightful owner. All well with the world!

I hope all is well with your world! Have a great week.

14
Jun
2020

Tackling Food Waste

categories: Curry, Pastry, Rice

One of my goals this year was to reduce food waste. One of the downfalls of blogging, and being in cookbook club, is that I often buy ingredients of which I only need a small amount. Add to this my penchants for stocking up when things are on sale and buying things well…just because. As a result, my freezer and pantry are jam-packed and I sometimes forget about fresh produce in the fridge until it is too far gone to use.

Last year, I stole an idea off Jenny from Silver Screen Suppers and implemented a dairy shelf in my fridge. All dairy items go onto it which means I can keep track of those items a bit better. To twist the old phrase around “In sight, in mind”.

Recently I have also (maybe also inspired by Jenny???) implemented a “Use By Shelf” that contains the items that need to be used in the near future. Again, I have found that keeping these items front of mind has helped me to ensure that they are used in a timely manner.

Fridge Freezer Pantry Week

My latest endeavour is Fridge, Freezer, Pantry week where one week a month I minimise my shopping and cook as much as possible from items in….wait for it…my fridge, freezer and pantry.

Bet you never saw that one coming given the ambiguous name of the challenge!

My aim for this week is to only buy fresh fruit and vegetables. Everything else has to come from you know where!

Here is how the first attempt at this went

Sunday Night – Baked Lobster!

Cos, you know, if you’re going to start something, start it with a bang!

I bought lobster tails at Christmas when they were on sale. They came from the freezer. Everything else came from the pantry.
The recipe called for fennel. I didn’t have any. Normally I would have bought some but this week? I had some dill leftover from the potato bake so I used that instead.
I also subbed in Worchestershire sauce for the anchovy essence the recipe demanded.

This was an okay dish. I think the white sauce dulled the flavour of the lobster a bit which prevented it from being a great dish. I would not make it again which is why I have not included the recipe. If you want it, let me know. I don’t know why you would but hey, you do you!

Monday Night – South American Chicken and Rice

This was amazing! Diana Henry’s from Oven to Table is our current Tasty Reads selection and so far every dish has been a winner.

This recipe used chicken from the freezer and rice and black beans from the pantry. The only things I bought specially to make this was a punnet of cherry tomatoes and some chicken stock.

I did not use fresh peppers, I had some in a jar which I used instead. There were also chillies and garlic in that jar so I added them in too.

There was a lot of this leftover and given I had the potato bake and some soup to eat for lunches I made little one-serving packages of this and popped in the freezer for future use.

Tuesday night – Pizza

Earlier in the week Mum dropped off a heat and eat pizza. Someone had given her two and we benefitted from her surplus. I had film club that night so this was a perfect night for the Fussiest eater in the World to pop something in the oven whilst I chatted about the pros and cons of Revolutionary Road with my friends.

It was ok. Not as good as pizza shop pizza but better than frozen / supermarket pizza.

Wednesday – Bacon, Halloumi and Vegetable Pasties

A little while back I made the veggie pasties from Jamie Oliver’s Veg. I had a LOT of the leftover vegetable mix so I popped it in the freezer. The halloumi and pastry also came from the freezer.

The bacon came from the use-by shelf. 😇

I bought nothing for this meal and it was delicious!!!! Believe me, the picture does this no justice!

Thursday and Friday – Lamb and Cashew Curry

Oh. Wow. This was AMAZING!!!!

I used Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Lamb and Cashew Curry for this.

I had to buy cashew nuts and coriander for this but it was worth every cent! This was divine! The lamb was melt in the mouth tender and the cashew gravy was lick your plate clean good!

Oh! I intended to make some flatbreads for the curry but ended up just serving it with rice. I bought some oat bran for the flatbreads which I did not end up using. Grrrr. 😡

Saturday – Squid, Chorizo and Chickpea Salad

Yay! I got to use those chickpeas on the Use By shelf!

I bought some oregano for this. It was marked way down. TBH though, I would have been happy with the leftover coriander from the curry.

Oh lord, I dropped my recipe for this into the frying pan that had all the chorizo oil in it! Luckily I was able to find it here!

My favorite dishes…I tried so hard to come up with just one but it really was a tie between the curry, the pasties and the South American Chicken Rice!

The Positives

Eating out of the fridge, freezer, and pantry created some amazing meals. Having said that, I had a lot of things in those places that made it easy!
Pretty much everything on the use by shelf got eaten.
I spent WAY less money than in a ” normal” week of shopping
I also feel I threw out fewer items than usual.
It was really fun to build my menus around the items that needed using!
Being conscious of not wasting anything also made me more proactive about ensuring that the leftover South American Chicken and the soup I was having for lunch were also frozen up for future use.

The Negatives

On Saturday morning I had to throw out an untouched bunch of broccolini which I could have used in the pasties.
We also threw out a whole cucumber, some ratty-looking chives and some bean sprouts
I now have pretty much a whole punnet of oregano to use, which even though it was bought highly reduced I have no further use for and which I don’t think really worked in the salad for which it was bought.
I bought that oat bran I never ended up using. One more thing in the pantry….

The Learnings

Keep a much closer eye on the produce drawers
Don’t buy things for which you have only one use (even if they are on sale)
Keep using what I have
Try to shop more than once a week for fresh produce so that things do not languish in that produce drawer
Take tips from the experts.

Whilst a few things went into the freezer and a few things went into the bin, on the whole I was really happy with my first attempt at fridge, freezer pantry week. It made me conscious of things that I need to be doing all the time and of how I can make the best use of what I already have. More than that though, it inspired me to keep going and to really get my act together when it comes reducing the food I waste.

This is what the useby shelf looked like by the end of the week. The four containers at the back are three serves of a cottage pie the Fussiest Eater in the World made for his work dinners and the last of the pasties.

I didn’t quite get through all that hummus but resisted the urge to buy another tub when I went shopping this week.

The three new containers hold some of the leftover chorizo and chickpea salad, and half an onion and half a lemon that I used to make it. That oregano is also there…😣

My favorite dishes…I tried so hard to come up with just one but it really was a tie between the curry, the pasties and the South American Chcken Rice!

If anyone has any tips on what to do with it, please let me know!

Indeed if you have any tips on reducing food waste, food management, etc please send them through, I would love to hear how you meal plan and your ideas on how to reduce waste. I have only just started this journey and know I have a LONG way to go before I get this mastered, so any advice I can benefit from will be greatly appreciated!

Have a great week! Stay safe and reduce waste!